Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is my pick.

I’ve got two study laptops and apart from Tailscale giving me some grief very recently with DNS resolution, I literally haven’t had any problems with either machine. Both have been going for 1.5 years.

I like the LMDE route for the DE already having pretty decent defaults and not requiring much tweaking from the get-go. Xfce (as it ships by default in Debian) absolutely works, but I end up spending an hour theming it and adding panel applets and rearranging everything so that it… ends up looking similar to Cinnamon anyway, because default Xfce looks horrible in my opinion

I no longer have any complaints about Beszel. Thank you!

Seconded. My only complaint (which this might already be a feature I haven’t found yet) is it doesn’t seem to support multiple drives. But yes, it is shit easy to set up and has a beautiful UI

Everything but the fingerprint readers just works.

Good to know the struggle for the fingerprint reader wasn’t just me. I did “get it working” but it was extremely hacky and it wasn’t what I was after; I only wanted fingerprint for login, not additionally for sudo, but that’s not how it set up and I didn’t want to spend even more countless hours trying to fix that

Hey guys, my Dad was always a neck bearded Unix admin so I’ve grown up my whole life on FreeBSD, then moving over to Gentoo during my teen years.

I’m starting to have thoughts about switching to Windows given that’s what my new job uses, but I couldn’t find any instructions on compiling Windows outside of very outdated releases like 2000. Also, does anyone know if emacs and htop are compatible, as those are my most used applications?

On that ThinkPad, LMDE.

Oh god, I got Murena (LineageOS distro). How does one install that onto a ThinkPad T480…

For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.

For my gaming PC, I’ve got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I’d either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I’d just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I’m doing on there

This might be for the better, but Discord was so infuriating about updates and forcing you to download them what felt like 50% of the time I opened it, I gave up and just use it in Ungoogled Chromium now. I’m pretty sure within a few months I ended up having 15+ debs of Discord in my Downloads folder.

For anyone else trying to use the native Discord app on Debian, I think they’ll find this a major treat.

The digital sign the local university has is powered by a Raspberry Pi - I caught it rebooting while driving past

While I’m far from being a sysadmin I’m in the same boat. Main study laptop is Linux but I just end up using Windows on my gaming PC for the same reasons.

I think this is a bad take, a take that assumes one is superior for using Linux over proprietary alternatives

Looking up the specs of a D270, looks like the memory is upgradable.

It also looks like the Intel Atom N2600 it has (from my reading) is actually a 64-bit processor

I’d probably say you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a bigger DDR3 memory stick for it for dirt cheap or free from an e-wasted notebook

Ultimately it depends if the performance loss you’re finding is memory limited or CPU limited right now, but I would think that giving it 2 or 4GB + giving it 64-bit would go a long way

My thoughts exactly seeing this post. Haven’t heard that particular rhetoric here before. Typing this from my Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS

Should be the same link without the tracking

https://www.ebay.com/itm/134956529143

The question is so generic and open ended it’s not a surprise. The only filter on this is “runs well on ThinkPad” and “lightweight”, which are both up to interpretation

Can completely agree with the LMDE 6 recommendation

I decided on the basis of making my hardware last as long as I can, I chucked an i7-2760QM into my Latitude E6420 and 16GB DDR3 memory, shit actually runs flawlessly with LMDE. It even was able to run Windows Server 2022 in a VM while having me screen share said VM for an assignment I had.

For the phone bit, I started off with really old smartphones like a Galaxy S1, but basically any old old phones are really built like mini laptops and are usually pretty modular as they weren’t often water resistant or actively anti-repair

However I fully get your point and fall into the same boat with cars

I’ve had experience with the older Toughbook CF-18’s and Linux (specifically Xubuntu actually), in my case mine worked out of box, but I had the digitizer option.

Could you give us the output of the lspci and lsusb commands, to see if it’s being detected?

There is also Synaptic which is a graphical front-end for apt, although I would definitely class it as less user friendly than Discover and the like.

I know if I was doing some Linux challenge with no terminal it would have to be my crutch.

Edit: Arch Linux has pamac which I used more frequently than the terminal back then.